Organizations acquire the right to use electronic resources (e.g., software or hardware functions) through a complex set of electronically-enforceable agreements that provide specific terms under which the electronic resources may be used. Each agreement can grant rights to an entity account or a device to access one or more electronic resources under one or more electronically-enforceable constraints (e.g., according to the terms). A resource control system can examine and enforce these rights. For example, the electronically-enforceable agreements can be referred to as “licenses.” The resource control system can also include a distribution system. The distribution system can account for consumption of individual rights (e.g., “entitlements”) to one or more electronic resources. A license entitlement is a consumable representation of a key that provides access (e.g., with electronically-enforceable constraints) to an electronic resource or a set of electronic resources. The license entitlement can be “consumed” by per usage, per account, per device, per time period, or any combination thereof. When the parties (e.g., an end-user device and the distribution system) commit to the grant of an entitlement, the end-user device is said to have “consumed” the license entitlement. This can be referred to as a license consumption event.
It is common for each license consumption event to have more than one potential license entitlement that may grant the requested rights of a consumption demand request. For example, an electronically-enforceable agreement can provision the different potential license entitlements for consumption. When this ambiguity (e.g., having multiple possible variations of license entitlements to consume) exists, enterprises (e.g., potential consumers of the license entitlements) generally desire to obtain the most cost effective entitlement to accomplish the desired task associated with the desired electronic resource. This can serve to minimize the cost of utilizing the electronic resource. Due to the large number of possibilities across usage constraint types and due to frequent changes to terms of electronically-enforceable agreements, resource versions, resource variations, resource editions, agreement editions, or any combination thereof, it is often impractical for any organization or person to conduct such an optimization exercise in a reasonable amount of time. This challenge is further exacerbated by variance in usage channels (e.g., usage of resources from physical installations, remote usage with technologies such as application or desktop virtualizations, global usage rights, etc.). A typical distribution system may need to process millions of consumption demand requests and grant just as many entitlements within a short period of time. Accordingly, conventional distribution systems are unable to optimize its assignments of license entitlement in an effective manner.